This review was e-mailed to me by a friend who attended the debate. I’ve posted it anonymously below.

Recall that two pieces of evidence were up for debate on Monday night: 1) the origin of life and 2) the origin of diverse body plans. The ID advocates had to argue that only intelligent causes can account for new biological information in the origin of life and in the origin of diverse body plans. The naturalists had to argue that there was a naturalistic explanation for both of the origin of life and the origin of diverse body plans. So how did they do?

My friend wrote:

In all fairness, Shermer and Prothero were given an impossible task: to defend the spontaneous generation of life and the sufficiency of neo-Darwinian mechanisms to account for its diversity and disparity.

It is no wonder that Shermer avoided the issue. Having said nothing positive about neo-Darwinian mechanisms, he said all there was to say. What was surprising was Dr, Prothero’s smokescreen of irrelevant and/or obsolete high school textbook arguments that were presented as timeless truths in a changing world of science. Their emotionally charged presentation gave the audience all the evidence it needed to conclude that their arguments were being driven by something other than empirical data.

Discussion of the empirical data would have to wait for Dr. Sternberg who gave a compelling argument against the sufficiency of neo-Darwinian mechanisms to even account for a limited number of evolutionary changes within mammals. Using one of the best series of evolutionary change known to paleontologists (wolf-like mammal to whale) Dr. Sternberg enumerated a substantial list of differences between the beginning and ending species in the series and went on to explain why neo-Darwinian mechanisms did not have sufficient time in the 9 million year window to generate the necessary changes. His presentation alone was worth the price of admission.

Dr. Sternberg identified himself as a “structuralist” rather than an ID advocate. While he will have to unpack the meaning and implications of that view, I would encourage him to enrich our understanding of why nature’s structures (e.g. everything from DNA replication systems to animal body plans) have remained fundamentally unchanged since their first appearance. Stasis and conservation are purely natural and are subject to the natural sciences. Their evolution or sudden appearance in the history of life, on the other hand, may or may not have been natural.

“How many times did God intervene?” was a question asked repeatedly by Michael Shermer. The simple answer is “at least once …  when he created everything in the physical universe.” After 1 rather major miracle is there any reason for rejecting the possibility that subsequent minor miracles did not take place?

“Who created God?” was another one of his favorites. The simple answer to this one is that “either the physical universe or its non-physical creator has always existed .. and it’s not the universe.

The “textbook” examples of evolution used by Prothero were things like the Miller-Urey experiment, where they sparked the wrong gasses to make amino acids, but did nothing to solve the problem of how the amino acids can be chirality-filtered, properly-sequenced, and peptide-bonded into a functional biological sequence. Not to even mention things like the sugar chirality or the interfering cross-reactions or ultraviolet radiation, etc. etc. etc.

I think that if these naturalists cannot understand the difference between an intelligent cause and a miracle, then they shouldn’t be debating. Maybe Shemer and Prothero need to read books written by their opponents. Shermer thinks science is a game you play where you aren’t really after the truth but just trying to explain things without God. So, he has no explanation for things like the big bang or the fine-tuning, for example, and probably tries very hard not to think about it. As for the origin of life and the origin of biological diversity, he had no explanation.

One bad thing about Meyer and Sternberg is that their slides were very hard to read – small print.

I’ll let you know if I get any more reviews of the debate. I’m also watching to see when the video comes out.

You can see other debates with Meyer and Shermer:

These two men have met several times before, most recently at Freedomfest in Las Vegas in 2008 (click here for video)… and appeared together on Lee Strobel’s Faith Under Fire program (video here).

Here’s what Shermer says about his perspective on atheist accommodation of religion:

This comment well captured my position and needs no further comment:

“What Shermer is trying to make peace with are sensible moderate theists, not fundamentalists. It is the people in the middle, not those on the fringes, who will, ultimately, determine the virulence of religion and irreligion. Shermer is trying to reduce religion’s virulence, not embracing fundamentalist ownership of the Bible, and it’s ridiculous interpretations of it. Shermer is right to reclaim the Bible as part of the Western cultural patrimony, and not leave it to fundamentalists to tell us what it means, and the implications to be drawn from it.”

The comment was mine, and made at this blog here. Shermer then offers a sensible debater’s middle ground, arguing that context in argumentative style is everything:

How one responds to theists all depends on the context and goals of the response. I think we nonbelievers have fallen into black-and-white thinking on the question of “what is the ‘right way’ to respond?” The answer is that there is more than one way. There are multiple ways, all of which work, depending on the context. Sometimes a head-on, take-no-prisoners, full-frontal assault á la Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, or Jerry Coyne is the way to go. Sometimes a more conciliatory approach á la Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, or your humble servant is best. It all depends on the context and what you are trying to accomplish.

Bravo to Michael Shermer for pushing back against New Atheist lockstep conformity with a little common sense (and a quote from yours truly).

The 4-man debate took place last night in Beverly Hills.

The first after-action report from Evolution News.

Excerpt:

It was all shaping up to be a serious heavyweight bout. And then Meyer and Sternberg simply KO’d the competition in the opening round. If I were being generous I might say that Prothero tripped over his own arrogance and impaled himself on his condescension, but let’s be honest; he was completely knocked out by Sternberg. I think Sternberg earned a third degree tonight, one in evolutionary bulldozing.

The debate video will be made available at some point by American Freedom Alliance, the sponsors of the debate, along with Center for Inquiry, The Skeptics Society and Discovery Institute.

[...]To call the debate a massacre would be a discredit to Sitting Bull. The only thing I can say is that Shermer needs to add a point to his booklet on how to debate “creationists” — namely, leave Donald Prothero at home in his van by the river.

Read the whole thing. I’ll post a link to the debate when I get it.

Note, I’ve never heard Rob Crowther sound this harsh before. It really must have been a blowout.

Occasionally you read an essay that feels like a breath of fresh air amidst an intractable debate.  In this case the debate regards how atheists (or Liberal Christians such as myself) should interact with religionists.  Should we tell them their beliefs are ignorant and stupid and comparable to a belief in Santa Claus like Dawkins does?  Or should we have respect for religionists and their beliefs and recognize that it is possible to be a serious intellectual and a believer.  Honestly I see both sides making good points but in the end I think the latter more tolerant approach is generally more useful and so does Michael Shermer.  Here’s the best part of his recent essay in the Huffington Post:

What is the right way to respond to theists and/or theism? That is the question asked at every atheism/humanism conference I’ve attended the past several years. The answer is simple: there is no one “right way.” There are multiple ways, all of which work, depending on the context. Sometimes a head-on, take-no-prisoners, full-frontal assault á la Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, or Jerry Coyne is the way to go. Sometimes a more conciliatory approach á la Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, or your humble servant is best. It all depends on the context and what you are trying to accomplish. When I debate creationists — whether of the Young Earth, Old Earth, or the Intelligent Design species — I try to take a Dawkinsonian/Coyneian approach and slam-dunk their flawed arguments and duplicitous claims without an ounce of accommodationism (although I am, by nature and upbringing, polite and respectful). Christopher Hitchens’s recent body slam he and Stephen Fry gave the Catholic Church for its stance on women’s rights, birth control, and Third World poverty would have brought tears to my eyes had I not been cheering so fervently.

On the other hand, if it is our goal to educate everyone on earth to the power and wonders of science (as it is the Skeptics Society and www.skeptic.com) and to employ science to solve social, political, economic, medical and environmental problems (as it is my personal goal), then we need as many people as we can get on board with a common goal, whatever it may be (starvation in Africa, disease in India, poverty in South America, global warming everywhere … pick your battle). If you insist that people of faith renounce every last ounce of their beliefs before they are allowed to join the common fight against these scourges of humanity, you have just alienated the vast majority of the world’s population from your project.

To what end? So you can stand up tall and proud and proclaim ” … but I never gave an inch to those faith heads!”? Well good for you! Just keep on playing “Nearer my Atheism to Thee” while the ship of humanity slips further into the depths of disaster.

The last paragraph captures what I think is an extremely important aspect of this debate.  There are more pressing issues in the world than converting everyone to atheism.  If religious fundamentalism really is blocking us from improving the world (which to some degree it probably is) then attempting to create a mass movement for atheism isn’t necessarily the answer.  I suspect it would be far more profitable to publicly advocate for more moderate and flexible forms of faith.

And favorably!

Shermer thought I had offered an amusing blog post retort to Jerry Coyne’s charge that he (Shermer) had gone soft on theism and now deserved the label “faitheist”. See Shermer’s Huffington Post piece here, and my blog post that Shermer quotes from here.

I got an email the other day from Paul Sparrow-Clarke who works in the mysterious reaches of the “7th floor” at the U. of L. (where the president’s offices are), letting me know that they have booked the speaker for the fall 2010 Owen G. Holmes  lecture.

Mark Sept. 23 on your calendar!

Michael Shermer

Author of “Why People Believe Weird Things”.

Shermer is the  e Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American.

Here is a cut and paste blurb about his books from his blog,

Dr. Shermer’s latest book is The Mind of the Market, on evolutionary economics. His last book was Why Darwin Matters: Evolution and the Case Against Intelligent Design, and he is the author of Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown, about how the mind works and how thinking goes wrong. His book The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Share Care, and Follow the Golden Rule, is on the evolutionary origins of morality and how to be good without God. He wrote a biography, In Darwin’s Shadow, about the life and science of the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace. He also wrote The Borderlands of Science, about the fuzzy land between science and pseudoscience, and Denying History, on Holocaust denial and other forms of pseudohistory. His book How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God, presents his theory on the origins of religion and why people believe in God. He is also the author of Why People Believe Weird Things on pseudoscience, superstitions, and other confusions of our time.

Whoot! When’s it gonna be September?

Here he is at a TED lecture. Its about 14 minutes long, but then, we’ve got time, haven’t we?

Anyway, in the video, Shermer mentions Katie Melua, so here is the video of the tune he mentions.

Technorati Tags: Michael+Shermer, Univerisity+of+Lethbridge, science, pseudoscience, skeptic, Katie+Melua

At Jerry Coyne’s blog today, Coyne takes after Michael Shermer for being a little too cozy with religion:

It always amuses me when an accommodationist tells the faithful that no, there is no conflict between science and religion, at least not if they stopped believing the things that cause a conflict.  In a Darwin-anniversay piece on CNN, Michael Shermer comes out as an accommodationist, and more:  he suggests that people really should modify their beliefs if they conflict with science.

In New Atheistland, accommodating other people’s beliefs (if you think they are false), and giving too much serious intellectual leeway to the question of whether God actually exists or not, are big no-nos. Such things put you in danger of being in “conflict with science”, and renders you a suspicious citizen of New Atheistland (if you call yourself an atheist). And so Shermer said, among other (to Coyne’s mind) ghastly things about religion, this:

If one is a theist, it should not matter when God made the universe — 10,000 years ago or 10 billion years ago. The difference of six zeros is meaningless to an omniscient and omnipotent being, and the glory of divine creation cries out for praise regardless of when it happened.

To which Coyne retorts:

Who is Shermer, I suggest, to tell people what beliefs should or should not “matter” to them?  Try telling this to a fundamentalist Christian, or a devout Muslim.

But perhaps if Shermer had used the word “need” as opposed to “should”, it would not have raised Coyne’s ire? (As in, “It need not logically matter when God made the world.”) Strictly speaking, theism, evolution, and a great age for the Earth are not logically incompatible.

Of course, evolution and an old Earth are logically incompatible with a literalist reading of the Bible, but the literalist reading is, in any case, blatantly false. The first chapter of Genesis, for example, gives clear structural markers of being written as poetry. Specifically, it is written in poetic parallelism (the 1st day corresponds to the 4th day, the 2nd day to the 5th, the 3rd day to the 6th). What we are reading is a poet laying out the world’s stage (on days 1, 2, and 3) and the things that move (the “actors” on days 4, 5, and 6). To put it in Shakespearean terms, Genesis 1 is a poetic expression of “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women players.” And in this profound sense, Genesis 1 is a reflection of this truth.

What Shermer is trying to make peace with are sensible moderate theists, not fundamentalists. It is the people in the middle, not those on the fringes, who will, ultimately, determine the virulence of religion and irreligion. Shermer is trying to reduce religion’s virulence, not embracing fundamentalist ownership of the Bible, and it’s ridiculous interpretations of it. Shermer is right to reclaim the Bible as part of the Western cultural patrimony, and not leave it to fundamentalists to tell us what it means, and the implications to be drawn from it.

And for this, of course, Shermer runs the risk of being demonized as an “accommodationist”, a “theologian”, and a “faitheist” by the confidence atheists who mentally inhabit that very narrow intellectual peninsula, New Atheistland.

I’m a bit late on this, but Carl Sagan would have turned 75 on November 9. The Skeptic Society’s Michael Shermer has set up a nice tribute to him.

The thing I admire most about Carl Sagan isn’t his academic credentials, impressive though they were. It’s that he wasn’t afraid to be a popularizer. In fact, he embraced it. He has been an inspiration for what I hope to accomplish in my own professional life.

Will Durant’s book The Story of Philosophy is credited with introducing more people to its subject than any other book. What Will Durant did for philosophy (and later, with his wife Ariel Durant, history), Carl Sagan did for astronomy.

Some pointy-nosed academics looked down on Sagan for pandering to the masses. But Sagan did more in his too-short life to actually educate people than the lot of them combined. How many of those same disdainful academics were inspired to forge a career in science because of Carl Sagan? For a subject as esoteric as cosmology, this is no small achievement.

People who work in economics or public policy would do well to pay attention not just to what Carl Sagan did, but to how he did it. Intellectuals from all disciplines should follow the sterling example set by Carl Sagan.

The Debate Over Darwin Continues: Stephen Meyer vs. Michael Shermer in Beverly Hills

In less than two weeks we will witness the rematch of the decade as Stephen Meyer and Michael Shermer face off on the question of intelligent design versus evolution.

These two men have met several times before, most recently at Freedomfest in Las Vegas in 2008 (click here for video). They also sparred in 2005 at Westminster College and appeared together on Lee Strobel’s Faith Under Fire program (video here). It will be interesting to see the new insights into the questions at hand as this debate has matured and developed.

The debate is hosted by the American Freedom Alliance and will take place at the prestigious Saban Theater in Beverly Hills on Monday, November 30, at 7:30pm. Dr. Meyer and Dr. Shermer will be joined by Dr. Richard Sternberg and Dr. Donald Prothero, respectively.

For more information and to buy tickets, click here.

(Via Evolution News)

Maher has fallen prey to the alternative medicine’s package of propaganda, misinformation, and subtle distortions. Because he is a popular media personality, his views are influential. Fellow skeptic Michael Shermer wrote an open letter published in the New York Times urging Maher to reconsider his anti-vaccination views.

Maher has responded here called A conversation worth having. In it, Maher attempts to justify his position in much the same way that creationists tackle the science of evolution: by evasion, logical fallacies, placing blame, and basically refusing to do the work necessary to understand the science but more than willing to improperly criticize that which he does not understand. So what can we make of Maher’s response?

To our rescue comes another smackdown by Neurologica’s Steve Novella. Why should he bother? As Steve explains, Maher is contributing to the public misunderstanding of science in perhaps the most important area – medicine. That is very serious, and he needs to start taking it seriously. That’s very good advice for all of us: we need to take scientific misunderstanding seriously.

Mind of the Market, by Michael Shermer, is by far the most complex and in-depth book I’ve ever read. I talked a little about it in my earlier post – Folk Numeracy. Now that I’ve finished reading it I have more to say.

As I mentioned in my other post, Mind of the Market talks about the evolution of the markets from hunter-gatherer to consumer-trading. All through the book, he tries to explain how human brain has evolved to work in hunter-gatherer system since ages but is required to operate in consumer-trading culture today and how this affects and shapes the markets. He also makes it a point that both markets and minds are moral.

The author talks about, among other things, free markets, libertarian paternalism, trust, happiness, money, science, rules, virtues, evil etc.  At some point, he even explained how a fMRI scanner works, the technical details of which escaped me the first few times I read those passages.

From the myriad of topics discussed in the book, I found the chapter -Why Money Can’t Buy You Happiness the most interesting. In that chapter, Michael Shermer addresses the question and analyzes the emotion of happiness. Though most of us agree, at least intellectually, that Money is not everything, we see people doing crazy stuff for money and the power it brings. We came to  view money and the comforts and thereby status it brings as a sign of ultimate success and most of the times pursue wealth in order to gain more happiness.

But as all wise people realize and say, money can’t buy you happiness and it’s been proven time and again. Studies show that despite the increase in absolute wealth people in America are no more happier than they were half a century ago.

Michael states that happiness is often equated with pleasure and the pursuit of pleasure is what makes people land on a hedonic treadmill. According to Hedonic treadmill theory, as a person makes more money, expectations and desires rise in tandem, which result in no permanent gain in happiness.

Like all other emotions, happiness is also a proxy to deeper instincts and needs and the author defines happiness as:

Happiness is an evolved emotion that guides us to find meaning in the simple social pleasures of interacting with our immediate family and extended family, friends and social circle, and to direct us to find joy in the meaningful purposes of life that most directly involve helping ourselves, our family, our friends, and our community.

An observation I found intriguing is that we all have our own set point for happiness set by our genes and tweaked by the environment and we usually return to our set-point within certain time after a happy or sad event.

We have access to information on every conceivable subject available either on-line or in books, tapes, discs and other media. People are relatively free to choose what information they retain and what to discard, what to believe and what to scoff at. However, given the availability of all this information, the levels of uncritical thought among people (even those one could describe as intelligent), is unbelievably appalling.

One can never believe anything with 100% certainty. There are ranges of probability always. And choosing what to believe is not so easy, but science, or more precisely The Scientific Method, through skeptical and critical thinking provides probably the only acceptable tool for making that choice with near certainty. Carl Sagan, in his book The Demon Haunted World – Science as a Candle in the Dark proposed a toolkit for skeptical thinking. Called the Baloney Detection Kit, it provides some basic tools for testing credulity (or detecting baloney according to Sagan).

I don’t want to re-invent the stunning work done by Carl Sagan, or by Michael Shermer in the video which the link above points to, but briefly the Baloney Detection Kit asks the following questions (the video provides a more detailed explanation with examples):

1. How reliable is the source of the claim?
2. Does the source make similar claims?
3. Have the claims been verified by somebody else?
4. Does this fit with the way the world works?
5. Has anyone tried to disprove the claim?
6. Where does the preponderance of evidence point?
7. Is the claimant playing by the rules of science?
8. Is the claimant providing positive evidence?
9. Does the new theory account for as many phenomena as the old theory?
10. Are personal beliefs driving the claim?

Now, if you’re still with me, I’ve just  mentioned all these things because it is leading up to the question I posed in the title of this blog post. Over the last week or two, I’ve been receiving comments on some of my earlier posts which lead me to believe that either there are monumental gaps in religious thinking which causes them to articulate innocently or unknowingly. Or there is an effort by believers to obscure their beliefs either deliberately or collaboratively through premeditation [Chapter 12, The Fine Art of Baloney Detection, Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World].

Over the years, I have observed that the debate between the evolution and creation camps has become more than just a fight between science and religion; it has come to represent the difference between belief and non-belief, the god-fearing against the heathen. It’s no surprise then that believers usually resort to dragging up this old debate every time they are confronted by non-believers.  In recent times, and with this being the Year of Darwin (the 200th anniversary of his birth on 12 February, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his seminal work On the Origin of Species on 24 November), Evolution is yet again under attack, and Creationism with its more fashionable alter-ego Intelligent Design, is defiantly being bandied about with renewed vigor, but with the same absence of credible evidence. Only these days, even though fewer people believe this creationist and intelligent design nonsense, those who still do, express their belief with the absolutist fervour that mainly religion provides.

It seems that the main problem creationists have with evolution is the gaps in the fossil record. They conveniently ignore the wealth of evidence that has been collected over the years in other areas and disciplines of science which overwhelmingly point to the validity of evolution, and natural selection. Ergo question 6 in the Baloney Detection Kit above. And at the risk of belaboring this point, consider this revelation from Richard Dawkins in his book, The Ancestor’s Tale :

In spite of the fascination of fossils, it is surprising how much we would know about our evolutionary past without them. If every fossil were magicked away, the comparative study of modern organisms, of how their patterns of resemblance, especially of their genetic sequences, are distributed among species, and of how species are distributed among continents, and islands, would still demonstrate, beyond all sane doubt, that our history is evolutionary, and that all living creatures are cousins. Fossils are a bonus. A welcome bonus, to be sure, but not an essential one. It is worth remembering this when creationists go on (as they tediously do) about “gaps” in the fossil record. The fossil record could be one big gap, and the evidence for evolution would still be overwhelmingly strong. At the same time, if we had only fossils and no other evidence, the fact of evolution would again be overwhelmingly supported. As things stand, we are blessed with both.

The other grossly dishonest practice by creationists is the constant referral to evolution as a belief system or just a theory. Invariably in my correspondence, I have also come across the veiled inference to Darwinism as a kind of belief-system or religion. It’s quite inexplicable why to date, creationists have not learned what a scientific theory really is, with all the information available on the subject. Have you ever heard them refer to the Theory of Gravity, as just a theory?  Is it laziness or plain ignorance, or perhaps more sinister; wilful ignorance? And have you noticed this pathetic attempt by the creationist lobby to bring the whole debate down to the level of worship: do you worship Darwin or god? It leaves me filled with anger.

The other fundamental dishonesty I have come across is the attempt to pass religious texts off as containing profound truths about the secrets of the world, life and death, and even scientific facts. Most claims in this regard reference the bible, although I’m pretty sure that other religions make similar claims about their religious texts too. Consider the following from one of my commenters:

…things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.

If you haven’t figured out what this scientific fact is, allow me to enlighten you: everything you see is made of invisible atoms. Although why the particular text does not state ” things which are seen are made of atoms” is beyond me. However, I’ve been cautioned not to question the word of god.

He…. hangs the earth upon nothing. (Job 26:7)

Supposedly it is a great leap forward from ancient mythology when the belief was that the earth sat on the back of some animal or other creature (common belief from Greek mythology is that it was the Titan Atlas, but it has been more accurately interpreted as him actually holding up the sky on his shoulders to prevent the earth and sky from embracing). The contention is that the bible revealed long before the advent of science that earth floated freely in space. Perhaps it has not occurred to believers that by the time the bible was being compiled, people had already figured out, just by observing the moon, that maybe the earth was also floating freely in space. But it still doesn’t explain why the wording is not plain, and why the earth should “hang” on anything, even if it was nothing.

He that made him can make his sword to approach unto him. (Job)

Apparently a reference to behemoths in the book of Job, describes the dinosaurs and how god made them go extinct. What the book doesn’t describe is why god would create dinosaurs in the first instance and then destroy them before the great flood that apparently wiped out his original creation of man.

There are off course other claimed references to scientific fact in the bible, but it’s not necessary to list them. I think the point is made. Some of these other references apparently point to the fields of medicine as well. Who knows, maybe there is the cure for AIDS in there somewhere, but we’re too dumb to find it. What also remains inexplicable is why the claimed scientific facts were not more clearly spelled out to enable man to use them and thus eliminate years of suffering and misery. Apparently god’s agenda encompasses a great deal of pain and suffering, then grovelling, before salvation is earned.

I have touched on a few aspects of flawed religious thinking here, but the question still remains: Is it naive ignorance, or a deliberate attempt to obfuscate? Or maybe a bit of both?

Mr. Deity began life as a Mormon, he tells the Atheists here (but if Dawkins is right, there’s no such thing as a Mormon, Catholic, Baptist, Pentecostal, or Atheist child)… and Michael Shermer was a *Pepperdine-trained evangelical. They both converted, obviously. (Hey there, *Caleb… how’s life in southern California?)

In reading my most recent dead tree edition of Skeptic magazine, I noticed that there were two articles on the Large Hadron Collider and the potential catastrophic effects that could come from bringing it up to full power (black holes eating the Earth etc.). I’ve raised my own nervy questions about this here, but I was expecting Skeptic to set my nerves to rest, and to offer, well, a skeptical deconstruction of the very idea that there was any danger at all to bringing the Large Hadron Collider to full throttle up. Like ghosts and UFOs, I fully expected Skeptic to conclude, in no uncertain terms, that catastrophe concerns surrounding the Large Hadron Collider are born of pseudoscientific hysteria and conspiratorial bullshit.

But that’s not what the lead article argued. In fact, it went over the issue with a good deal of thoroughness and concluded that maybe this whole subject should be discussed more, and in public. There was a short one page rebuttal to the cautionary article, and it was offered by a physicist who is highly respected in both the atheist and scientific communities (Lawrence Krauss). I read Krauss’s rebuttal carefully, as well as the lead cautionary article a second time, and I must confess that the cautionary article struck me as, frankly, more thoughtful. And Krauss’s rebuttal struck me as rather prickly, snarky, and contemptuous (as opposed to thorough and substantive). There was an underlying impatience in Krauss’s response, as if to say, “Trust me on this. I’m an expert and I’m very smart.” In response I was thinking, “Well, I agree you’re very smart, but at least refute the previous article point by point.” But Krauss, apparently, couldn’t be bothered.

After reading the dead tree edition, I thought I’d see if the two articles are online, and they are. The link is here. Read them carefully. If nothing else, they are both exercises in critical thinking from two very different vantage points. And if the first article is anything like near correct, then we could all be in real peril a month or two from now (when the Large Hadron Collider is scheduled to go with full throttle up).

Much has already been said and written about Enron. And probably everyone in the world knows about the great scandal since ages. But much to my chagrin, I haven’t heard about it until recently. As per my understanding, a huge accounting fraud took place where executives hid billions of debt and eventually brought the energy company to bankruptcy. Reference to this shaking event keeps coming up in various books/articles I read, whether the subject is business or economics or corporate culture or markets or technology or even evolutionary psychology. A few of such interesting unusual contexts are:

1. Michael Shermer, in his latest book Mind of the Market on Evolutionary Economics, says that the corporate culture Jeffrey Skilling brought with him is the main reason. He believed that the cutthroat competition leads to efficiency and success and implemented a policy called Peer Review Committee system, which resulted in steady cut down of jobs and personal humiliation for the relatively low performers. In the course of time, this led to mistrust, low employee morale – selfishness and greed. The author was trying to demonstrate the power of situation to draw out the better or worse angles of our nature. The other extreme is of course Google.
2. Laurence Gonzales too mentions Enron fleetingly in his social psychology book, Everyday Survival where he observed that when the top executives were arrested once the company fell in disgrace, police handcuffed them with their hands behind them, even though they are not violent criminals. The author was explaining the significance of hands in our evolution and how we see bound hands as ultimate loss of status as humans.
3. Malcolm Galdwell, the bestselling author of Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers, has spoken out his mind in his latest interview with Lou Agosta of BeyeNETWORK after his talk at the Discovery 2009 conference and Innovators’ Summit in Chicago. While I know nothing more about the actual presentation of Gladwell except that he opined that the Enron scandal was the “canary in the coal mine” – an early warning – for the September 2008 financial meltdown. In the interview, he explains that in the modern day, there is just too much information. While Jeff Skilling was sent to prison for 24 years for withholding information, Gladwell points out that the information has always been there – accessible to public but the thing is – the huge amount of data hid the lack of integrity and made company operations a mystery. In other words, it was utterly incomprehensible for non-experts and made it difficult for them to draw correct conclusions in a timely manner. Gladwell also mentioned that according to some of the best financial minds, Enron’s disclosures were perilously close to being legal. The main point is of course that the information overload increases receivers’ responsibility.(For anyone interested to read the full interview, click here. But you might need to register on the website in order to view the full article.)

Certainly an event can be viewed and analyzed from various perspectives. And Enron scandal is a kind of historical event which people would never forget.

On a different note:

Indians, especially Andhrites, can immediately relate Enron scandal to the recent Satyam fraud. Exactly same thing happened- manipulation of accounts. In this case, funds were transferred to subsidiaries owned by the family. This scandal too has shaken the Indian corporate world and cast shadows of doubt by the first world nations on the integrity of the Indian outsourcing industry. Much is being said and analyzed about Satyam too. Here is an interesting viewpoint of Gurucharan Das: On the difficulty of being good.

It only seems natural that Satyam is being referred to as Indian Enron!

Story here. (H/T Manawatu Christian Apologetics via Apologetics 315)

Excerpt:

A public debate about the origins of life hosted by the American Freedom Alliance and featuring: Stephen Meyer, Rick Sternberg, Michael Shermer and Don Prothero

Admission: $20.00 Students: $10.00
RSVP: Saban Theater Box Office (323) 655-0111

Monday, November 30th, 7pm,

Saban Theater, Beverly Hills

Here’s a neat quote from Harvard paleontologist Richard Lewontin, courtesy of Apologetics 315:

“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

I hope that Shermer and Prothero can be more open-minded with respect to the evidence compared to Richard Lewontin’s faith-based epistemology.

This Hemingway quote comes from The Writer’s Quotation Book (1985, p. 55):

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shock-proof shit-detector.

On page 2 of A New Literary History of America (Harvard 2009) is an interesting account of what Christopher Columbus thought he had found when he explored the Venezuelan coast on his third voyage to what would come to be known as America. Columbus, when “he came across four great rivers gushing out into the sea” concluded that he “hadn’t found a new world . . . [but] the oldest one of all”: Eden!

According to Toby Lester, the author of the first essay in this volume:

The idea wasn’t as crazy as it sounds. The Bible placed the Terrestrial Paradise in the distant east, and most medieval maps placed it at the far-eastern edge of Asia. Humanity’s march west through space was also seen as a march west toward the end of time—an apocalyptic notion that medieval theologians had been bandying about for centuries.”

Imagine how Christopher Columbus’s head must have spun to think that he was probably looking into the watery river mouth of Eden, and that he had reached the circular culmination of space and time! God had apparently chosen Christopher Columbus (or so he imagined) to inhabit a very special place in human history, for Columbus seemed to be preparing the way for the End Times:

In his later years, Columbus imagined himself to be playing a starring role in this cosmic drama—a Messianic figure who, by carrying the Christian message across the ocean, was hastening the coming of the End of Days. He was no longer just Colombo or Columbus. He was also Christopher—that is, Christo-ferens, or “Christ bearer.” 

Heady stuff to imagine yourself in such dramatic historical terms, but I think this part of Columbus’s life has two cautionary elements in it:

1. concerning background knowledge; and
2. concerning associative intelligence

First, with regard to background knowledge: What is it that we think we know when we encounter new data? We may wildly misread things if we are not rigorously scrutinizing our presumed background knowledge (the things we think that we already know about the world). In this instance, Columbus had never applied sufficient scrutiny to his assumptions about the Bible. He took it for granted that the Bible contains infallible knowledge about the world’s past and its future, and he thus incorporated these assumptions into what he encountered in the present.

Second: associative intelligence (making connections between things). One of the glories of the human mind is its associative intelligence. It’s what, for example, makes poetry possible. “I measured out my life in coffee spoons” (T.S. Eliot). But what happens when the associative intelligence goes unchecked by empirical reality testing? Well, you start to get connections like these:

• I was born under the sign of Aries the Ram; therefore, I must like to butt heads with others!
• My kid was diagnosed with autism two months after getting her vaccinations; therefore, vaccinations must cause autism!
• I see four rivers entering the sea. Eden has four rivers. This must be Eden!
• God wanted my parents to name me “Christopher” because I am, in these End Times, the “bearer of Christ” to the last nations unexposed to the gospel.

Critical thinking lessons from Columbus’s experience: (1) in the face of new data and novel experiences, check your premises and background assumptions; and (2) exercise your associative intelligence, but also seek evidence for those associations. In the thrill of novel associations, keep your head about you.

in last week’s Newsweek, Lisa Miller, the religion editor, of whom I’m not a huge fan in general (though she’s intelligent and mostly reasonable), wrote yet another article on the new atheism and its main leaders, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris (why no Daniel Dennett, the final member of the “four horsemen”?).

I don’t want to discuss her entire article, or some of her specific points, at length, but two of her main points are that these three individuals have unfairly dominated the discussion/debate thus far and that it’s time to move on past the aggression and onto rethinking spirituality, humanism, etc.

regarding the first point, it’s not that these individuals have unduly grabbed a hold of the debate and won’t let anyone else have a turn.  there have been plenty of other books written about atheism — theirs just happen to have been the most successful.  granted, Dawkins and Hitchens were already well known (the former more so, generally) and so there was more attention given to their books, but Harris was virtually an unknown.  he just happened to write two very successful, very persuasive books that caught on.  sure he has done a lot of debating, but he’s also been working on his PhD in neuroscience of some sort and is no media whore.  (by the way, does she know that he doesn’t even like to use the term “atheist”?)

the real reason that they have “hogged” all the attention is simply because people like Lisa Miller won’t shut up about them.  honestly, she’s written at least three or four pieces for Newsweek on them this year already!  and in this vein, you can’t find any broadly appealing piece on the growth of non-religious portions of the country that doesn’t mention “the three” or “the four” (horsemen, that is).  they’ve only been dominating because people like you, Lisa Miller, keep complaining about them.  you are the silver-haired wind in their middle-aged-cracker sails.

and the truth is, she doesn’t appear to have any real clue as to what’s happening in the atheist blogosphere.  there are far louder and much more prolific voices on the internet (PZ Myers comes to mind), and there is a grand variety of atheists out there whose levels of “stridency” and whose views regarding religion vary enormously.  for those atheists concerned more about the undue influence of religion in the public sphere than about winning arguments, there’s Hemant Mehta, your Friendly Atheist.  and then there’s the somewhat overlapping, ongoing debate among professional scientists about how science should relate (or more accurately, how scientists should try to relate science) to religion, aka the “accommodationist” debate.  so here you have a lot of writers, some of whom may be non-religions but that’s irrelevant, who are opposed to the attempts of people like Francis Collins or Kenneth Miller to placate moderately religious Americans by claiming that all’s well between science (read: evolution) and religion.  Jerry Coyne is probably the leading (unconquered) writer in this vein.  there are even non-religious writers/scientists like David Sloan Wilson who see atheism and science as types of religions, further muddying the waters.

anyway, the point is, among atheists and agnostics and secular humanists and the like, “the three” are hardly the most active or the loudest voices.  what about writers like Ian McEwan or Victor Stenger?  it’s one of those, “Well, everyone’s talking about them so they must be the most important” things that endlessly perpetuates itself.

the second point, which is a good one, is also problematic when it comes out of Miller’s mouth because, as I hinted at in the last point, there are tons of writers and groups out there for non-religious people who are doing just that — focusing on re-conceiving our notions of ethics and morality and what it means to be “good without god.”  there is the Secular Coalition for America, a lobbyist group, there’s the Center for Inquiry, and there are all sorts of secular student groups and local communities that have been raising their voices and getting media attention lately.  you know all those billboards going up around the country (and in other countries) and needlessly causing a stir?  well, those poster boys have nothing to do with it.

even the first bus campaign in England was started by a hitherto unknown, Ariane Sherine.  sure, Richard Dawkins donated some funds and took a publicity ride, but he joined after the fact.

and what about the Brights?  it’s a designation chosen by non-religious intellectuals who want a more positive take on their outlook, as opposed to “atheist.”  plus, it’s a more proactive way of understanding the world, not just by what you don’t believe, but by how you think the world can and should be understood.  here you find all sorts of very influential intellectuals, include Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, yes, but also Michael Shermer and Steven Pinker.  in fact, for many people, atheism implies a secular, naturalistic, humanistic outlook.  (fyi, Sam Harris also dislikes the term “bright”; he is very picky.)

speaking of Sam Harris — the entire latter part of his The End of Faith was about the future beyond faith, exploring new areas of human spirituality that go beyond our inherited traditions!  his book was essentially about the very thing Miller says we should be doing instead of what she accuses him of doing!  Jerry Coyne briefly touches on this here.

finally, moving on to a topic/group Miller does cover, there are various humanistic groups out there, represented in her article by Greg Epstein, Harvard’s Humanist Chaplain.  Epstein is the author of the soon-to-be-published Being Good without God, a topic he is very enthusiastic about.  his approach is an entirely positive one, focusing on what “a billion non-religious people do believe” and helping to create renewed sense of meaning and even (gasp) spirituality among non-religious persons.  he is by far not the only person with this outlook of course.  I think of the ethicist Peter Singer or the author Ronald Aronson, who wrote the influential (and on my wishlist) Living without God, or even the sociologist Phil Zuckerman, who write last year’s popular Society without God (also on my list).

in fact, Germany has had a figure like Epstein for a while now in the person of Michael Schmidt-Salomon, a well-known German humanist writer and apologist (who is associated with the atheist camp though he also avoids the term).  he has worked to try to encourage humanism and take the debate and media flurries surrounding the “new atheism” to a “new humanism” (whence the title of this post).

in any case, I do believe that in the case of the non-religions, any media attention is good attention, as more and more people realize they are not alone in their unbelief (as the billboards proclaim), and that they too have a say in what happens in this country and in this world.  and it has also been (or at least will be) helpful (even if still shocking) for people to realize that there are non-religious persons (even atheists!) all around them, and that’s a good thing.  Schmidt-Salomon talks about this, and uses the wonderful German word “stinknormal” to describe how average these atheists prove to be once people take a look at them (Der Sensationswert des Atheismus verglühte im Scheinwerferlicht und man stellte fest, dass „diese Atheisten“ letztlich auch nur stinknormale Leute sind, kaum geheimnisvoller als Mutti Krause von nebenan.)

and hopefully the public attention will continue to turn and focus on this other side of being non-religions.  it’s not all about put downs and arguments  — it’s also about excitement about what we do know about ourselves and this world, along with how we continue to go about understanding both, and creating room in public discussions about science, ethics, morality, policy, the environment, etc., for those of us who don’t feel the need to appeal to tradition or revelation or supposedly unchanging religious values in order to have a reasonable, fruitful conversation about our future.

It’s interesting that scientists who believe in evolution say that we should assume evolution and only ask how, but never ask if. They, of course, do not offer the same allowance to scientists who believe in intelligent design. They must simply reject the allowance for an intelligence behind the existence of life and varied species and accept evolution.

In Michael Shermer’s book, Why Darwin Matters, he states the following:

Debating creationists on the “science,” rather than the theology, of Intelligent Design is problematic, and I have been encouraged not to do so by such friends and colleagues as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins, whose wisdom I consider inestimable. They argue, correctly, that there is no debate about the reality of evolution – the issue was settled a century ago – and that the numerous debates about how evolution happended are all well within the normal borders of science.

Now, notice a few things in this quote. First, the author indicates that the science of Intelligent Design is “science” while the science of evolution is science. Of course, by this he means that intelligent design science is not science at all. However, the truth is much more complex. Science is the use of the scientific method, which includes observing, hypothesizing and testing. Does intelligent design science do this? It does. Does evolution science do this? It does. They both fall very nicely into the definition of science. Anyone who says they do not is simply attacking through mischaracterization and not through evidential logic.

That’s right. Those who say evolution is not a science are either dishonest or misinformed; however, the same is true for those who say intelligent design is not a science.

Consider the basic process of evolutionary science:

1. I see many different species in the world. I wonder how they got here. (Observation)
2. Maybe they all started as a simple life form which changed over time and resulted in all the species we see today. (Hypothesis)
3. What would we see if this were true? (Test)
4. Do we see this? (Test)

Now consider the basic process of intelligent design science:

1. I see many different species in the world. I wonder how they got here. (Same observation)
2. Maybe an intelligent being created them. (Hypothesis)
3. What would we see if this were true? (Test)
4. Do we see this? (Test)

If you disagree with these steps in some way, that really doesn’t matter. The point remains the same and cannot be refuted: both systems observe, hypothesize and test. This is science whether we like it or not.

To be clear, one can argue against the results of intelligent design science, but one cannot argue that it does not employ the scientific method – as it does. This is simply logical with no emotional attacks.

Now, I must go back to the earlier quote. Was evolution settled over a century ago? Give me a break. It wasn’t even close to being settled. A cursory reading of any modern evolutionary biology textbook shows that the modern thinking is wildly different than that of 100 years ago. Additionally, many of the proofs for evolution that were used over 100 years ago have either been disproved today or turned out to be complete fabrications. Again, an emotional argument is one without facts behind it and to say that the issue was “settled a century ago” is a modern fabrication or rewriting of history at best.

While reading Richard Dawkins newest book the other day, which is supposed to reveal the evidence for evolution, I couldn’t help but wonder why he kept appealing to emotional arguments so frequently. Then it came to me: he needed to meet a publisher page count and there just wasn’t enough evidence to fill the pages. (See, that’s an example of an emotional argument, just in case you were wondering.)

1. As it turns out, both my landlady and the new housemate are atheists! The housemate came out after I said I was studying Sumerian stuff. She started a monologue about LOL!Bible, which was riddled with tiny little inaccuracies.

I managed not to engage in a megalomaniacal monologue myself. These days, I try to show a little bit of restraint, and only do this in the privacy of my room.

With a mirror.

2. Dispatches from the Culture Wars had the most hilarious troll ever this week. I mean, no amount of quoting will do this guy justice.  Every sentence he throws at us is like a little work of art, a pearl necklace,  a set of Fabergé eggs next to the Russel’s teapot, a gem of entertaining vapidity all in itself.

But, to those who happened to read this blog, and read there. (If any) I apologize for my profanity. I should not have wrote it. I just get so angry when I see Socialist Liberals mocking a party that has done more good, than the Democratic Party has ever done. Further more, a party that still fights for America. Unlike the Terrorist appeasing Liberal Democrats.

I mean, I almost cried here! Anyway, Brain-Dead Socialist Liberal Science Blog Attacks Me (boy, it had all the things you didn’t like, huh? AWESOME), and The Ed Brayton War iI Over, Please (there were tissues involved here, because I cried a little). His About page is a quote-miner’s paradise:

Likes: Beautiful women, skinny women,

Dislikes: Fat women, (…) being overweight.

How cruel of me to resort to petty ad hominems, but, clearly, this just might be the reason why he’s single, hurr hurr. I mean, he should post more.

We wouldn’t need the telly if he wrote more.

3. A fucking awesome WWII veteran tells the bigots to stuff it (well, nah, he’s more classy than that, BUT AWESOME)

This reminds me to call my fucking badass Lieutenant grandmother, yarrr.

4. The Church of Sweden will gaymarry gays. Gayly!

5. Meanwhile, the  veterans in the UK  tell the BNP to kindly fuck off and leave the military alone. Why yes, this is what they mean by “The BNP are, quite honestly, a very unattractive group” *snerk*.  But wait!

“The values of these extremists – many of whom are essentially racist – are fundamentally at odds with the values of the modern British military, such as tolerance and fairness.”

This is a good week for veterans!

6. This is also a good week for vaccines! Wired spanks the anti-vaccine movement thus:

“I used to say that the tide would turn when children started to die. Well, children have started to die,” Offit says, frowning as he ticks off recent fatal cases of meningitis in unvaccinated children in Pennsylvania and Minnesota. “So now I’ve changed it to ‘when enough children start to die.’ Because obviously, we’re not there yet.”

Ouch.

The doubters and deniers are empowered by the Internet (online, nobody knows you’re not a doctor) and helped by the mainstream media, which has an interest in pumping up bad science to create a “debate” where there should be none.

7. Meanwhile, in another corner of the internets Michael Shermer spanks Bill Maher for his vaccine denialism. YAY.

One of the most remarkable features of science is that it often leads its practitioners to change their minds and to say “I was wrong.”

Hah!

8. Meanwhile, in real life, an awesome trans woman doctor, Marci Bower, is helping the victims of female genital mutilation (FGM) by doing “clitoralplasty” FOR FREE.

Fact: Marci Bower is so totally badass.

9. I watched this vid, because Dan linked it. I don’t know what other people saw, but what I saw was this:

Whoa, what a trainwreck!

Also, Rashomon, LOL.

10. A XIII century Maastricht church was  turned into a bookstore. This is old news, but PICTURES PRETTY BOOKS ZOMD.

Also: hopefully, a time will come, when all churches will turn into sanctuaries of knowledge. BOOKS! I mean, BOOKS!

(Maastricht. That’s not too far from here. Hmm. BOOOOOOKS!)